Maryland Press Pass on e-Bay

So I am sitting in Maryland’s student union working on my blog yesterday afternoon when that familiar red light on my BlackBerry starts flashing. A new e-mail. Oh, and it’s from Maryland. Then another, and another.

Dear Eric Prisbell,

It has come to my attention that an individual is posting Maryland football media credentials for sale on e-Bay. … Individuals wearing these credentials will be escorted by police from the stadium immediately.

It continued, and my first reaction was, “I was having a great day and now I am getting blamed for something.” Turns out, all Maryland media members got the same email and some said they felt similar initial anxiety when reading it. There are a few rules for the press: Don’t cheer, and don’t sell or give away your press pass. Last time I saw something like this was at the Western Athletic Conference men’s basketball tournament in Tulsa earlier this decade, when a local bozo at the Buckaneer Bar offered a colleague and me money for our press passes. We declined and ordered another beverage.

But yesterday, someone asked for $100 for a press pass to Saturday’s Eastern Michigan game. By 10 p.m. last night, it was taken off e-Bay. It makes one wonder how the pass got in the wrong hands in the first place.

I'm fairly certain we had an incident a few years back during the conference basketball tournaments where a reporter was leaving because our local team had been eliminated and threw the credential into the hotel room trash. The reporter was later contacted by the conference when someone else tried to use the credential. And this wasn't the Big East in New York, either. It was something like the A-10 in Dayton or Cincinnati. Amazing.